By Richard Girard
This is the first of two parts explaining why–like its left-wing counterpart, Marxism–Libertarianism is a Utopian idea that cannot possibly work in the real world, unless that world was populated by James Madison’s angels (Federalist No.51). But like Marxism, it does have some good ideas that we should not ignore. the difficulty is separating the wheat from the chaff.
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John Stuart Mill by Wikipedia commons
“The spirit of our American radicalism is destructive and aimless; it is not loving; it has no ulterior and divine ends; but is destructive only out of hatred and selfishness.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays, “Politics” (Second Series, 1844).
It is an untested and utopian system, which historian Michael Lind has described as a “cult,” having no real world example upon which its proponents may base their lofty claims of moral, economic, and political superiority . Robert Locke, in his article in the March 14, 2005 issue of The American Conservative , described it as the “Marxism of the Right .” I am writing of course, about Libertarianism, in particular as practiced by those on the Right.
Modern right-wing Libertarianism has led the conservative movement in its headlong plunge into a form of right-wing anarchy. They have taken the creed of Libertarianism so far to an imagined minarchist or anarchist utopian ideal that HBO talk show host and comedian Bill Maher has disavowed his previous self-identification with Libertarianism, saying that it has become too selfish and self-righteous.
[pullquote] The author presents an interesting and provocative thesis. Our only difference of opinion lies in his equating libertarianism with Marxism. Philosophically they are not in the same class (no pun intended) nor is the utopianism of Communism demonstrated. Also, Marxism, strictly speaking, is a scientific method to understand society’s anatomy, and the motion of history via the interactions of science (technology) and the class struggle, about which Libertarianism has nothing to say. [/pullquote]
Whether it is Robert Nozick’s minarchist ideal from Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), or Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, libertarianism is the ultimate exaltation of the individual over group, in terms of rights, needs, power, and authority. I believe that libertarianism’s growing popularity is the result both a carefully orchestrated plot, as well as a cunningly fashioned trap, created by the plutocrats who wish to make this nation an oligarchy both de facto and de jure.
Believing in the Utopian Self-deception of Libertarianism
As I pointed out one-and-a-half years ago in my December 29, 2011 OpEdNews article, “Let’s Sit This One Out:” “The great lie we have been spoon fed by the One Percent over the last thirty-some years is the one publicly expressed by Margaret Thatcher ( Woman’s Own ; London, October 31, 1987 ), ‘ There is no such thing as society: there are individual men and women, and there are families.’ This lie justifies the selfishness and ego which has so nearly destroyed the [political systems of the] Western Democracies–together with their economies and any semblance of the rule of law–in the last decade-and-a-half.” [Words in brackets are amplifications added for clarity–RJG.]
Libertarians cannot see this as a lie or a trap. It fits in so perfectly with their narcissism, their carefully cultivated view of being in control of their lives and the world around them, that it blinds them to what I believe is the reality of minarchist Libertarianism taken reductio ad absurdum to its final conclusion: a state where might makes right, and those with economic power dominate and ultimately control the rest of us, while our few surviving Constitutional boundaries are ground into the dirt by the overweening power of enormous wealth. The reduction in the regulation of corporations since Ronald Reagan became President in 1981, has permitted the growth in the size and the power, both economically and politically, of large corporations in America, giving us a preview of the final form of a minarchist or anarchist libertarian state without any of its supposed benefits: libertarianism in its destructive phase.
Just as the utopian vision of Marxism was overly dependent on the willing cooperation and moral rectitude of individual humans operating as a selfless collective, so too is Libertarianism overly dependent on the moral force of enlightened self-interest and the moral rectitude of individual humans interacting with one another as selfish individuals. The libertarians are depending on human beings to act like James Madison’s angels (The Federalist Papers No. 51), which is something that has never been, nor can ever be.
Magical Thinking in a Modern World
Libertarians speak constantly of “self-reliance” and “responsibility” in much the same way a Christian speaks of Faith and a state of Grace, but they never explain how the majority of humanity is to attain this utopian state. Viewed from the micro level, modern life is far too complex for any individual actually being able to do it all–even to the extent that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington were able to more than two centuries ago–and still live anything other than a hermit’s life, limited to the most basic human necessities.
Viewed at a macro level, libertarianism is found to be just as wanting. Michael Lind pointed out in his June 14, 2013 article on Salon.com, “The Question Libertarians Just Can’t Answer,” ” If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines? ” The dogma behind Margaret Thatcher’s above statement, which so limits the scope of human relationships, and does not consider the recognized anthropological realities such as the clan or the tribe, let alone the nation-state, is accepted by many right-wing libertarians as dogmatic fact, even if they have never actually heard Thatcher’s statement.
Libertarians, in a poorly considered attempt to sidestep this incongruity, have created a bizarre, hypothetical system of contracts between themselves and those they must deal with for the goods and services that are required to survive in modern society. At the same time, they deny the very existence or necessity of a Social Contract–the system of custom, civil and criminal laws and bureaucratic regulations; under the unifying authority of the U.S. Constitution–by which their system of actual and implied individual contracts for goods and services might become feasible.
The Baby in the Bath Water
Libertarians need to understand, I do not stand unalterably opposed to every aspect of their creed. Fox radio commentator Alan Colmes calls himself a “liberaltarian,” which is a description that is probably close to my own Weltanschauung. I believe that very careful deliberation should be given before the government inflicts laws and regulations on its citizens. At the same time, I consider the objections raised over the violations of the so-called “rights” of corporations to be nothing more than a smoke screen designed to hide the fact that many of the wealthiest Americans receive an additional degree of legal protection from their own illegal and immoral actions through corporations. I agree with the Libertarians that we could probably use fewer laws and regulations. I would also note that too many of the laws passed by Congress–as well as our state legislatures–over the last forty years have had as their primary purpose to provide a benefit to the members of the oligarchic plutocracy, and not the average American. One of the results of these laws is the shifting of the nation’s tax burden to the lowest 90% of our population in terms of income, which was according to the Census Bureau, approximately $144,000 in 2012.
It should also be noted that government–at the Federal, state, and local level–has passed environmental and safety regulations that–as written–are most easily complied with by the largest and wealthiest transnational corporations. These gigantic, inhuman conglomerates propose and often help write these laws and regulations as a means to protect themselves from civil or criminal liability. Smaller firms, who have far fewer available liquid assets and credit to use to ensure compliance, struggle to meet what are generally the most costly and stringent requirements, drafted by the large corporations’ friends (and often times future employees) in the government.
I, like everyone else, would like the government to stay out of my private life, and that of my friends and neighbors, as much as possible. I agree with George Bernard Shaw’s observation, in a speech made in New York City on April 11, 1933, “The ordinary man is an anarchist. He wants to do as he likes. He may want his neighbour to be governed, but he himself doesn’t want to be governed. He is mortally afraid of government officials and policemen.” Laws and regulations are often the result of some individual or special interest group putting their idea of what is good and just ahead of what their neighbors believe is actually required. This can be done through either the vehicle of unthinking indifference, or the calculated action of those promulgating the law. This invariably starts when the individual or group at the heart of these actions turn the people affected into “the other,” making them “things” within the hearts and minds of those who initiate these new rules, and thus unworthy of the same rights and protections that the initiator enjoys. Prohibition and the “Jim Crow laws in the United States were examples of these types of laws and that way of thinking. Thinking of people as “things,” as I first stated in my August 5, 2009 OpEdNews article, The Hope for Audacity , is where–in my humble opinion–human evil truly begins.
With that said, I do want a government that intervenes in cases of child, parental, or spousal abuse, and in any crime involving fraud, coercion, or the use of force. I do believe in public education, at every level, because as countries like Finland and Denmark demonstrate, public education can work; you simply can’t do it on the cheap. I also believe in national defense, not the welfare system for the Military Industrial Complex that we have today. I believe in the ongoing public construction and maintenance of our physical infrastructure, including, but not limited to: roads, bridges, dams, water, sewer, power, communications, harbors, and other transportation systems and services–especially mass transit. This is because government is not run on a profit motive for ever increasing shareholder dividends, and is more responsive to the average citizen’s needs than is private enterprise, which must (at least on an interstate or transnational level) answer to the demands of their shareholders. Any of these systems left to private enterprise must be tightly regulated by the government (as AT&T, the airlines and long haul trucking companies were in the early 1970’s), both in order to prevent abuse of the general public in the name of profits, and to prevent smaller but viable firms from being driven out of business by larger firms wishing to eliminate their competition.
Modern Government is Less the Enemy of Individual Liberty than Corporate Power
I believe that even today, most corporations will subject their workers to unconscionably long hours, at unreasonably low pay, in dangerous and noxious working conditions, producing dangerous products for the consumer, while causing the large-scale destruction of the surrounding ecosystem, all in the name of making a few pennies more per unit of profit. The horror stories of sweat shops and defective products from companies that have off-shored their manufacturing operations proves this beyond a shadow of a doubt. This sort of selfish, short-sighted behavior is regrettably an integral part of human avarice. Only government has the power and ability to counteract the economic power of a corporation on a state-wide, interstate, or multinational level, in a timely fashion.
Libertarians believe that corporations are morally neutral entities with no desire other than to increase their profit as much as they can. It is this “blow-back” from America’s corporations increasing their profits that requires our having a countervailing power in the form of government regulation. Too many libertarians have forgotten the essential truth stated by President Lincoln in his First Annual Message to Congress on December 3, 1861, “Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital; Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.” Yet libertarians believe that the metaphorical “Invisible Hand” of Adam Smith will take care of any of the problems created by free market capitalism.
In my August 28, 2010 OpEdNews “Street Fighting Man–A Rock-and-Roll Epistle, I wrote of this type of behavior at length. (Words in brackets are again corrections or amplifications.) Quoting Kenneth Lux, “‘ The saving grace [of Smith’s system] was supposed to be the “invisible hand” of competition”[C]ompetition would keep these instincts [to drive competitors out of business] and ‘expensive vanities’…in line. Smith would hardly have been surprised at the motives of Rockefeller, but”would have been chagrined at his success. Smith”overlooked the possi bility that self-interest would work to undermine and eliminate competition and”tie up the invisible hand. It is”unrestrained self-interest that is the fundamental flaw in any absolute policy of laissez-faire.’ (Adam Smith’s Mistake: How a Moral Philosopher Invented Economics and Ended Morality; 1990, pp. 118-9.)
After the Michigan Supreme Court’s 1919 decision in Dodge v. Ford Motor Co. ( 170 N.W. 668; Mich. 1919) –where it was held that a corporation’s primary responsibility was to its shareholders, not to the corporation’s employees or the public–American corporations have became [myopic, sociopathic] beasts who, unless they were very closely watched, [will] commit a multitude of [immoral acts or actual crimes], all in the name of the almighty dollar. Historically, these actions have included [murder, fraud,] theft, bribery, cheating customers [and employees], destroying the environment, permitting unsafe working conditions at their facilities, tax evasion, raiding employee pension and health care funds, and moving their factories across the country or around the world in the eternal quest for [the smallest iota of] additional revenue. Corporations have done all this while beggaring the towns and employees who supported them and depended on those facilities for tax revenue and jobs. As Kenneth Lux put it, ‘ In fact ” economists came to conclude that from the standpoint of self-interest it would be irrational for someone not to cheat if they could be reasonably sure of getting away with it. Honesty is the best policy’ is not an economic doctrine.’ (Lux; op cit., p. 118.) [If you doubt this, let me give you a quote from Joel Bakan’s interview with Milton Friedman for his book, The Corporation:The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, 2004, p.34, ‘A corporation is the property of its stockholders, he told me, ‘its interests are the interests of its stockholders.’…There is but one ‘social responsibility’ for corporate executives: they must make as much money as possible for their shareholders…There is but one instance when corporate social responsibility can be tolerated, according to Friedman–when it is insincere.’]
This was the reason that Senator John Sherman of Ohio proposed the anti-trust act that bears his name in 1890. To quote Kenneth Lux once again, ‘When Senator Sherman spoke on behalf of the first antitrust legislation, ‘The law of selfishness, uncontrolled by competition, compels it to disregard the interest of the consumer.’ Implicit in Sherman’s statement, but seemingly not recognized by him, is the [apprehension] that the law of selfishness also compels it to eliminate competition.’ (Lux; op cit., pp. 118-9.)”
Free-market mavens invoke Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations to justify their belief in an unregulated free market system. These ignorant fools always neglect to take notice that: 1) the free market described in The Wealth of Nations is always on a small scale, e.g. a town or province; 2) the “invisible hand” is a metaphor that Smith states falls apart at the national or international level, or when competition is reduced to a small enough number of businesses that permits them to effectively collude; 3) as Kenneth Lux explained in his book Adam Smith’s Mistake, the failure of Adam Smith to add the word “only” to his famous statement, “It is not [put the word “only” right here] from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self interest,” (The Wealth of Nations, Book I, chapter 2, p. 23); made the author of the Theory of Moral Sentiments appear in his second work to be justifying an amoral system. [See Lux, op cit., p.124.]
Most of us never learned in our high school or freshman college American History class that the underlying cause of the American Revolution was the British government’s open support of what was then the most powerful corporation in the world: the British East India Company, whose excesses were also in part responsible for Smith writing his book. The tea, opium, cloth, spices, and other monopolies held by this lucrative creation of the British mercantile system, payed out millions of pounds in dividends to the King, nobility, and prominent members of parliament every year. This was done at the cost of making the average British citizen, both in the home islands and the colonies, seek out black market sources or do without.
Ambrose Bierce nailed the real problem with corporations and their dangers to the nation’s commonwealth in The Devil’s Dictionary: ” Corporation. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility.”
High Finance and the Golden Delusion of the Past
Right-wing Libertarians, as well as many conservatives, seem to be very enamored with concept of the “Gold Standard.” They neglect to remember that it was the return to the Gold Standard in 1873 that triggered the bank panic of that year. The United States didn’t recover from that panic until the discovery of gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1875-76. There were further panics in 1884, 1890, 1893, 1907, 1930, and 1931. Those first three panics were resolved by the discovery of gold in the United States and its territories that inflated the amount of gold available, creating an inflation of sorts, although gold maintained its set value of $20 per ounce. The panic of 1907 was resolved only because J.P. Morgan convinced his fellow investment bankers to sell enough gold to the U.S. Treasury in exchange for government bonds to alleviate the crisis. In 1930 and 1931, there was no one as wise as J.P Morgan around to fix the problem, and the Austrian School of Economics–then touted as the most advanced (and only scientific) economic theory available–was followed by the Federal Reserve as if it were Gospel. The problem of rampant deflation and bank closures in the United States was not resolved until FDR took the U.S, off the gold standard, declared a bank holiday, and ordered that all privately held gold coinage be returned to the Federal Government.
There are some economists and historians (John Kenneth Galbraith in his book The Great Crash 1929, is one) who trace the cause of the Great Depression to Great Britain’s return to the gold Standard in 1926. Winston Churchill, when he became Chancellor of the Exchequer, attempted to return Great Britain to the gold Standard, at the pre-World War I exchange rate of one British Pound Sterling equaling $4.86 American.
This action by Great Britain vastly overvalued the British Pound and undervalued the American Dollar in comparison to their actual economic strength and value on the world markets. This overvaluation of the British Pound caused European (and some American) investors to withdraw funds from the American stock, commodities, and other markets–including bursting the Florida real estate bubble–destabilizing the American and other economies. This in turn caused first a stagnation, then a decline of wages among American workers. By 1927, money began to be hoarded in the form of gold and silver specie, as well as cash, straining the liquidity of most smaller American banks. Because of the shortage of available cash, the abuse of workers by the capitalist class had grown so extreme that by 1928, American workers were seeing their wages decline from their height of a decade earlier–during World War I–to a point where an estimated fifty percent of the American people lived in poverty (having an income of less than $1000 annually if you were married) in the year before the Great Crash. (This information is derived from Internal Revenue Service data cited in Donald Barlett’s and James Steele’s 1994 book, America: Who Really Pays the Taxes; Simon & Schuster, New York; chapter 2 in general, pp. 61 and 66-7 in particular; as well as John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Great Crash 1929 ; 1954, Houghton Mifflin Co.; Boston; pp. 14-5 )
On the Way to Making Karl Marx a Prophet
As Gary Anderson stated in his article “Karl Marx Predicted Libertarian/Ron Paul Foolishness,” published in Business Insider, October 18, 2011, ” Here is the bottom line Dr Paul: The money at the top will not spur the economy. The money at the top will not help small business. The money at the top will start another ponzi lending scheme. You don’t want Glass-Steagall (as you said in 2010) even though you voted not to repeal it. You don’t want the speculation stopped. Karl Marx predicted you. You will help destroy capitalism and prove Marx right.”
The two primary underlying ideals of modern Libertarianism, according to both Murray Rothbard And Robert Nozick, consists of non-aggression against other people, and the sanctity of private property and its transference. (Murray N. Rothbard: For a New Liberty, Macmillan, New York, 1973; and The Ethics of Liberty, New York University Press, New York, 1982,1988. Robert Nozick: Anarchy, State, Utopia, Basic Books, New York, 1974.) While these may seem like reasonable and even desirable ideas, the first is an unreal utopian ideal, while the second has no basis in the underlying history of English Common Law, or American jurisprudence.
The very nature of capitalism and its initial inherent competition is aggressiveness; and the elimination of your competition, as Kenneth Lux pointed out in Adam Smith’s Mistake, is the laissez-faire capitalist’s ultimate goal. All laissez-faire capitalism requires the undercutting and elimination of competition until some sort of meta-stable oligopoly is achieved by two or three colluding competitors, or a complete monopoly comes into existence.
A Delusion of “Private” Property
“Private” property is, with regards to real estate (including mineral, timber, and water rights, as well as their transference), a misnomer. The disposition of private real estate has always been limited by the needs of the sovereign, even if that sovereign is the nation’s people as a whole, i.e., “We the People.” This is the legal and factual basis for eminent domain, zoning laws, and property taxes: land is granted by the sovereign people to the individual/business for his/its long-term use and conditional “ownership.” Those conditions include zoning laws and payment of property taxes, as well as “good behavior” in its use. Transference is limited by inheritance and other laws. Property taxes are in reality nothing more than the ongoing payments of rental to the government. Eminent domain represents the government power to break the “lease.” To look at real estate ownership any other way is simply deluding one’s self.
Libertarians and conservatives do not like this fact, and object strenuously to being reminded of this fact by denying it. Look at what Rothbard and Nozick say above: Libertarianism’s ideals are ” non-aggression against other people, and the sanctity of private property and its transference.” These Utopian concepts are every bit as unrealistic as Karl Marx’s stateless, classless, moneyless, wageless society. So the very foundation of Rothbard and Nozick’s ideal of Libertarianism is founded on a pair of false premises.
Libertarians (and most conservatives) believe that somehow land, and its continued ownership, is some sort of absolute right, like Freedom of Speech, of the Press, of Conscience, and of being secure in our possessions and our papers, as long as we do not abuse that right. But like most of the unpleasant truths in life under America’s Constitution, they always forget those important conditional clauses in the Fifth Amendment, “without just compensation,” and “without due process of law.” Those two clauses maintain the People’s sovereign right to violate the privacy or take back the land from the “owner,” whenever the People’s representatives (the government) have determined it to be in the People’s best interest.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Richard Girard is an increasingly radical representative of the disabled and disenfranchised members of America’s downtrodden, who suffers from bipolar disorder (type II or type III, the professionals do not agree). He has put together a team to prosecute Bush, Cheney, et al., but has given up waiting for his credentials, and fully expects either the United Nations or Spain to beat him to it. An autodidact, he has read more than 3000 books over the last 35 years, on subjects including history, mathematics, political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, women’s studies, physics, martial arts, science fiction, and art. He is still editing Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trying to make it comprehensible to someone who is not a Rhodes Scholar. It surprisingly calms the worst effects of his bipolar disorder, acting both as a sleep aid, and helping to keep him out of the funny farm.
